WHat he means is that the color is off for the PnS camera. The white balance is whacked so the colors are not true. IE: green hue on everything. When you manually set the white balance, pictures come out better. If you have a white/gray card then you can set your camera for different light. Something that is white in one light may not be white in another... so if you have a true white card, you can calibrate your camera to that. Mine takes a picture of the white, and adjusts accordingly. You can use anything you know is truely white.
Addiitonally, due to the selected camera settings (selected by the camera) the image was over exposed, meaning that too much light was let into the sensor so you have blown out highlights on the blyxa.
The higher the ISO, the lower the light you can shoot in, but the trade off is grainy/noisy shots. The DSLR is able to shoot good quality with the higher ISO (3200) partly because it is able to open the aperture wider (f9), whereas the PnS camera must maintain a lower ISO of 200 because of the aperture f4.7.... the trade off is in order to get enough light, the PnS had to shoot with a much slower shutter speed.... 1/8 of a second as opposed to 1/50 of a second for the DSLR. That's why the bubbles were blurred. THe aperture is basically the size of the hole when the shutter opens up.
Wait, did I have that right? Well at least I sounded smart. lol
ANyways the basic premise is you have to account for different factors. Low light usually means slower shutter speed. BUt, if you're shooting something moving, it will be blurred by the low shutter speed, so you have to adjust other stuff, such as the aperture (size of the hole) and raise the ISO (lower quality/clarity, but shoots in lower light).
If you know what the basic camera functions do, you can calibrate them accordingly and get some good shots. Taking pics of a planted tank is pretty easy compared to taking pics of livestock.
Play around. Experiment. Have fun. POST PICS!!!!
You have it pretty close. I can actually make the shot sharper by manually upping the ISO on the PnS but I wanted to demonstrate that a shot (satisfactory vs perfect) can be achieved with a PnS on its most basic setting).
Point and Shoot (here in referred to PnS going forward) primer in as few words as I can come up with:
ISO vs fStop
Forcing the ISO higher, means the sensor is more sensitive to the light coming in, allowing you to pick a higher fStop number (smaller opening). The smaller the opening (higher the number ... counter intuitive but I don't want to get into a long winded (too late?) explanation of how the fstop numbers are calculated) the sharper the image. As pointed out, you can see more detail with the dSLR shot, that is because it was f4.7 (almost wide open for that camera) where as the dSLR was f9.
As mentioned above though, the higher the ISO ('film' speed) the more colour noise will be introduced (distracting coloured speckles all over the picture) so you would have to find the balance of what you think is acceptable with your own cameras as every camera model is different.
Shutter speed
This ties in with ISO and fStop. The more light that comes into the camera, the faster your shutter speed will be. As mentioned above, you can see how the co2 bubbles are streaks of motion in the PnS and in the dSLR they are frozen in space. That is the difference between 1/8 of a second vs 1/50 of a second. Without getting a PnS with near full manual settings, this will be hard to adjust as your ISO and fStop will be a large factor in too.
ISO: how much base light is recognized by the sensor
fStop: How little of that light you let through, sacrificing the amount of light to gain a sharper image
Shutter speed: This ultimately creates your exposure, too slow and the image becomes over exposed (bright), too fast and you end up with an under exposed (dark) image.
When it comes to PnS cameras, typically the easier of the settings to adjust is the ISO (sometimes referred to in the menus as "Sensitivity"). The higher the number, the more light is being let it (at the cost of colour noise). This will then have a cascading effect through the rest of the settings. You can also force the faster shutter speeds with a "Sports" setting if your camera has this. The camera will then try to get the highest shutter speed to stop the motion, but be aware that the cost on this would again be colour noise and a low fStop (more open).
White Balance (colour of image)
I did a custom white balance shot with the PnS (not posted as I wanted to demonstrate a PnS on its simplest settings that everyone has access to). The white balance was pretty close to the dSLR but was a little on the cool side, but much better than auto setting. Most cameras come with a way to do this, refer to your manuals.
In the simplest of terms, your camera is trying to decide what is white (before I'm corrected its actually looking for something a little different but I'm keeping it simple) in the image and basing the rest of the colours off of the white element. When there is no white available, the camera then has to try and figure things out on its own. This is really evident in my tank shot as there is nothing really white for it to pick from so its "best guess" left things a little on the yellowy-green side.
Colour Saturation:
In short, there is
colour, then there is
COLOUR. The intensity of the displayed colours are pushed up a notch or two. This is done mostly for when you are taking pictures of people, it can be less noticeable this way and can make skin tones look a little nicer, but when you are shooting something with lots of greens and reds in the image it can look overkill (as my demo shows). I cannot adjust this any further down on my PnS, this was on the "normal" setting, all other settings actually pushed it up higher. As with all cameras your mileage may vary.
I hope some of this helps when it comes to Point and Shoot cameras, it can be a little daunting at 1st but as you play with your settings more it will eventually fall into place. As I mention above, the best thing you can do is crack that manual thats still sitting in the box :eek5: At the very least it will tell you where to find some of the settings I mention above.
